in Flo’s mouth. Flo shut her eyes ecstatically, leaned back into her mother’s arm and began to suck away with long, horribly audible slurps. I sat there with my mouth catching flies, unable to think of a thing to say. The X-ray vision lifted to focus on me.
“Loves her mother’s milk, does Flo,” she said chattily. “I know she’s four, yeah, but what’s age got to do with it, princess? Best tucker of all, mother’s milk. Only thing is, her teeth are all in, so she hurts like hell.”
I went on sitting there with my mouth catching flies until Pappy said, quite suddenly, “Well, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, what do you think?”
“I think The House needs Miss Harriet Purcell,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz with a nod and a wink. Then she looked at me and asked, “Ever think of movin’ outta home, princess? Like into a nice little flat of your own?”
My mouth shut with a snap, I shook my head. “I can’t afford it,” I answered. “I’m saving to go to England on a two-year working holiday, you see.”
“Do youse pay board at home?” she asked.
I said I paid five pounds a week.
“Well, I got a real nice little flat out in the backyard, two big rooms, four quid a week, electricity included. There’s a bath and dunny inside the laundry that only you and Pappy’d use. Janice Harvey, me tenant, is movin’ out. It’s got a double bed,” she added with a leer. “Hate them piddly-arse little single beds.”
Four pounds! Two rooms for four pounds? A Sydney miracle!
“You stand a better chance of getting rid of David living here than at home,” said Pappy persuasively. She shrugged. “After all, you’re on a male award, you could still save for your trip.”
I remember swallowing, hunting desperately for a polite way to say no, but suddenly I was saying yes! I don’t know where that yes came from—I certainly wasn’t thinking yes.
“Ripper-ace, princess!” boomed Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, flipped the nipple out of Flo’s mouth and lumbered to her feet.
As my eyes met Flo’s, I knew why I’d said yes. Flo put the word into my mind. Flo wanted me here, and I was putty. She came over to me and hugged my legs, smiling up at me with milky lips.
“Will youse look at that?” Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz exclaimed, grinning at Pappy. “Be honoured, Harriet. Flo don’t usually take to people, do you, angel?”
So here I am, trying to write it all down before the edges blur, wondering how on earth I’m going to break it to my family that, very shortly, I am moving into two big rooms at Kings Cross, home to alcoholics, prostitutes, homosexuals, satanic artists, glue-sniffers, hashish-smokers and God knows what else. Except that what I saw of it in the rainy dark I liked, and that Flo wants me in The House.
I’d said to Pappy that perhaps I could say that The House was in Potts Point, not Kings Cross, but Pappy only laughed.
“Potts Point is a euphemism, Harriet,” she said. “The Royal Australian Navy owns Potts Point whole and entire.”
Tonight’s wish: That the parents don’t have a stroke.
I haven’t told them yet. Still getting up the courage. When I went to bed last night—Granny was snoring a treat—I was sure that when I woke up this morning, I would change my mind. But I haven’t. The first thing I saw was Granny squatting over Potty, and the iron entered my soul. That’s such a good phrase! I never realised until I started writing this that I seem to have picked up all sorts of good phrases from reading. They don’t surface in conversation, but they certainly do on paper. And though this is only a few days old, I’m already well into a fat exercise book, and I’m quite addicted. Maybe that’s because I can never sit still and think, I always have to be doing something, so now I’m killing two birds with the same stone. I get to think about what’s happening to me, yet I’m doing something at the same time. There’s a discipline about writing the stuff down, I see it better. Just like my work. I give it all my attention because I enjoy it.
I haven’t quite made up my mind about Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, though I do like her very much. She reminds me of some of my more memorable patients, those who manage to stay with me for as long as I’ve been doing X-rays, maybe are going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Like the dear old bloke from Lidcombe State Hospital who kept neatly pleating his blanket. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was folding sail, and then, when I settled to talk to him, he told me he’d been bosun on a windjammer, one of the wheat clippers used to scud home to England loaded to the gunwales with grain. His words, not mine. I learned a lot, then realised that very shortly he was going to die, and all those experiences would die with him because he’d never written them down. Well, Kings Cross is not a windjammer, and I’m no sailor, but if I write it all down, someone sometime in remote posterity might read it, and they’d know what sort of life I lived. Because I have a funny feeling that it isn’t going to be the boring old suburban life I was facing last New Year’s Day. I feel like a snake shedding its skin.
Tonight’s wish: That the parents don’t have a stroke.
I still haven’t told them, but it’s going to happen tomorrow night. When I asked Mum if David could eat steak-and-chips with us, she said of course; best, I think, to wallop the whole lot of them at the same time. That way, maybe David will get used to the idea before he has enough time alone with me to nag and hector me out of it. How I dread his lectures! But Pappy is right, it is going to be easier to get rid of David if I don’t live at home. That thought alone has kept my course steering for the Cross, as the natives call it. Up at the Cross, to be exact.
I saw a man today at work, on the ramp leading from X-ray to Chichester House, which is the posh red brick building housing the Private Patients in the lap of luxury. A room and a bathroom each, no less, instead of a bed in a row of about twenty down either side of a whacking great ward. Must be awfully nice not to have to lie listening to half the patients vomiting, spitting, hacking or raving. Though there’s no doubt that listening to half the patients vomiting, spitting, hacking or raving is a terrific incentive to get better and get out, or else get the dying over and done with.
The man. Sister Agatha grabbed me as I finished hanging some films in the drying cabinet—so far I haven’t had one ponk film, which awes my two juniors into abject submission.
“Miss Purcell, kindly run these to Chichester Three for Mr. Naseby-Morton,” she said, waving an X-ray envelope at me.
Sensing her displeasure, I took it and hared off. Pappy would have been first on her invitation list, which meant Sister Agatha hadn’t been able to find her. Or else she was holding a vomit bowl or dealing with a bedpan, of course. Mine not to reason why—I hared off like the juniorest junior to the Private Hospital. Very swanky, Chichester House! The rubber floors have such a shine on them that I could see Sister Chichester Three’s pink bloomers reflected there, and you could open a florist shop on the amount of flowers dotted around the corridors on expensive pedestals. It was so quiet
